Designing an affordable DR Target for your VMware production environment

One of the biggest concerns for IT professionals today is finding a Disaster Recovery plan that isn't going to break the bank. Join this webinar to hear best practices in implementing an affordable and easy-to-use Disaster Recovery option for your VMware production environment and discover the latest technologies that can provide continuous and asynchronous byte-level replication over any distance between your primary and secondary locations.

As FC-NVMe (NVMe over Fibre Channel) is preparing for it’s official launch, there have been numerous questions about how the technology works, how it gets implemented, and what makes it special when compared to traditional, SCSI-based Fibre Channel.

When we did our first webinar on FC-NVMe [link], we got lots of questions about more details, more technical aspects, and more thorough explanations. So here we are!

This presentation is going to be a more thorough analysis of the bits and bytes of FC-NVMe, where you will learn:

•What are the key differences and similarities between NVMe and SCSI Fibre Channel structures
•What are the main architectural differences between NVMe and SCSI deployments
•Impact on Queue Depth
•How to cross-connect legacy and future flash arrays with FC-NVMe

Please join us on August 29th for this advanced, deep dive on FC-NVMe.

The software-defined data center has been a heavily touted concept over the past few years, and heralded by some as the next step in the evolution of virtualization and cloud computing. Having a data center that is governed by software, rather than dictated by hardware, can lead to more fully automated and intelligent operations. Having infrastructure elements such as networking, storage and security conceived of as a services is, indeed, an attractive concept to many.

In this webinar we will be joined by JR Rivers, Co-Founder and CTO of Cumulus Networks, to talk about how he (and Cumulus) define the concept of a software-defined data center. He will present how the definition of a software-defined data center has evolved since its inception, and how tools like VXLAN, EVPN, Ansible and more can help organizations further their journey to a “software-defined” state and simplify network operations.

Join Jabez Tan, Keynote speaker at Data Centre World Hong Kong and Cloud Expo Asia, as he takes an in-depth look at the primary metrics that tell the story of the Hong Kong colocation market.

We track the market’s size and growth trajectory and provide a five-year CAGR projection, along with a detailed analysis of the underlying supply and demand dynamics. Our proprietary methodology takes this analysis to a number of levels.

First, colocation supply is measured from both a space and power perspective.
Second, all market metrics – including space, power and revenue – are classified and then measured as either retail or wholesale colocation.
Third, we size the market – again, from both a retail and colocation perspective – on an aggregated and sub-regional basis.

This webinar is an excellent resource for any service provider, investor or end user (service provider or enterprise) that is looking to understand and project the data centre market in Hong Kong or find a service provider.

The ICT sector is moving us inexorably towards a software-enabled digital world, but many still fail to understand the power of this trend, how it is going to impact/benefit the ICT Industries and infrastructures delivering them.

Among topics discussed will be:
- Present and future impact of Software Defined technologies on IT (challenges and opportunities)
- How Software-Defined is enabling the digital transformation
- Best practices and recommendation on adopting software-defined technologies with the future in mind.

This Webinar is aimed at IT professionals and CIOs/CDOs/CTOs seeking to understand more about how software-defined impacts the present and future of enterprises.

The journey towards a cloud native environment comes with its benefits but at the same time it has a lot of challenges. The main of which is how to put together different vendors who are not used to work with each other in one environment and make that work as a complete ecosystem. This session explores the questions and challenges that this journey brings and focus on the role of software and automation in it to make it as fast and as smooth as possible.

About the presenter:

Omar is the SDN solution owner for Cloud and Data Centers at Nokia. Omar has a broad experience in SDN and NFV technologies having worked on cutting edge projects for some of the biggest companies in the word. With a BSc in Computer Engineering and an MSc in Business Management he combines both very strong technical background with an excellent business awareness. Omar has two publications and two patents related to orchestrating telecom networks and modelling of network protocols.

Software defined and X as a Service are terms often used by organizations pushing “the next big thing”. Just like Cloud and DevOps before them, these are real movements and real principles that businesses and IT teams are embracing to deliver the services their own customer base have grown to expect. However, what does reality look like from what was proposed?

In this talk we look at what Software defined and “as a Service” mean to our customers, both independently and together as a consumption model for IT. We examine the benefits that could be realized as well as the challenges and shifts in behavior and policy that will be required to be successful.
How are you delivering “Software Defined Services” and what does it mean for your business, developers and in turn impact your customers? Join us as we summarize the journeys our customers are going on and what it means to them.

With the irruption of Open Source and Software-Defined components in the Data Centre, there has been a shift of cost from licensing and appliances - in the traditional IT - to operations. The challenge in this new era, where all the components evolve faster than adoption, learning curves and skill development, resides in keeping the operations efficient while adding innovation, with its inherent complexity.

During this webinar we will go through best practices to navigate that transition and set up your operations teams to the future while keeping cost contained and services competitive.

As businesses become increasingly dependent on SAP HANA for real-time decisions, the demands of the infrastructure continue to grow. A more efficient and modern infrastructure is required to meet the demands of these global always on real-time environments. Storage plays a crucial role in maintaining high service levels and guarding against costly downtime. The right storage for SAP HANA is all flash.
Join us as Jeff Kato, Senior Analyst and Consultant from Taneja Group describes why all flash is the best choice for HANA. Jeff will also provide a comparison of the leading all flash solutions in the market and illustrate where 3PAR All Flash leads the competition in critical storage efficiency metrics. Stephen Carpenter, Master Technologist from HPE’s Storage Business Unit, will share some key insights that distinguishes 3PAR StoreServ architecturally for HANA workloads. Additionally, Hasmig Samurkashian, Product Manager from the HPE Storage team will share actual customer deployment examples.

Fibre Channel (FC) is the storage networking protocol for enterprise data centers, with over 11 million ports deployed. Fibre Channel is purpose-built –and engineered to meet the demands for enterprise data centers that require rock solid reliability, high performance and scalability. It can even transport new storage protocols like NVMe natively.

Flexible and resilient, Fibre Channel frames can be encapsulated in both an IP packet (FCIP) as well as a Layer 2 frame (FCoE) and provide unparalleled performance for storage systems. Even so, many people don’t actually understand how it works. This live webcast will help you understand the basics so that you can make informed decisions yourself.

In this “Foundations” webcast, we’ll answer key questions, such as:
- What is Fibre Channel?
- What makes Fibre Channel so reliable?
- How is Fibre Channel different from other storage protocols?
- What are the best practices for designing Fibre Channel solutions?
- And more

If you’re not familiar with Fibre Channel and want to learn more, or if you are interested in learning about how Fibre Channel is purpose-built for storage and future proofed for next-gen NVMe storage arrays, join us at this live event. Our experts will be available to answer your specific questions on the spot.

This exciting panel explores the kinds of storage that IoT solutions demand. We talk about what’s different about data storage for IoT compared to existing enterprise applications, what capabilities are required to support massive, distributed IoT networks, and how and why existing storage solutions may or may not be the best IoT application storage. Plan on getting into unique IoT data protection concerns, real-time data pipelines, machine learning, data accessibility, distributed processing, and of course, what’s actually practical for the IoT already emerging in today’s data center.

The growing popularity of object-based storage has resulted in the development of Ethernet-connected storage devices, herein referred to as IP-Based Drives and subsystems supporting object interfaces and in some cases the ability to run localized applications.
Typical scale-out storage nodes consist of relatively inexpensive enclosures with IP network connectivity, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time.
To ease management of these drives, SNIA has approved the release of the IP-Based Drive Management Specification. In this webcast, you’ll hear from authors of the specification who’ll discuss:

• Major Components of the IP Based Drive Management Standard
• How the standard leverages the DMTF Redfish management standard to manage Kinetic and other IP-Based Drives
• Providing a standard management interface for drives that are part of JBOD or JBOF enclosures

Fibre Channel is the most well known dedicated storage networking protocol in use in data centers today, and is considered the gold standard for storage in terms of availability, reliability, and scalability. However, it does require some specific design and planning requirements. For that, storage administrators use the Fibre Channel Speedmap in order to plan.

In this webcast, you will learn how to use the Fibre Channel Speedmap, what the numbers mean, and why its useful:

- Why do storage administrators use the Speedmap?
- What’s the difference between throughput, bandwidth, baud rates, and speed?
- Why does this matter for Fibre Channel and not, say, Ethernet?

This live webcast will be useful for anyone who wants to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to “speeds and feeds,” and make sense of the numbers.

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) across different environments. However, what do these approaches mean for a hyperconverged storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Find out in this live SNIA-ESF webcast where expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, will move beyond the hype to discuss:

One of the most used technologies in Data Centers today is the storage protocol iSCSI. With the increasing speeds for Ethernet, the technology is more and more appealing because of its relative low cost to implement. However, like any other Storage Technology, there is more here than meets the eye.

In this webcast, we will be focusing entirely on iSCSI. We’ll start by covering the basic elements that will make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture. In particular we will be talking about:

•iSCSI Definition
•iSCSI offload
•Host-based iSCSI
•TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol. If you are interested in making the most of your iSCSI solution, this webcast is for you.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=608

NVMe is one of the most interesting new developments to happen to storage in the past several years, and NVMe over Fabrics extends these capabilities over a Storage Area Network. Given that 80% of all existing Flash storage solutions deployed are interconnected with Fibre Channel (FC), many questions have arisen about what it is, how it works, and why someone might want to consider using Fibre Channel for NVMe-based solutions.

In this technical webinar, we’re going to be addressing some of these fundamental questions:

- How does Fibre Channel and NVMe work together?
- How is NVMe over Fabrics different from “traditional” Fibre Channel?
- What changes do I have to make to my Fibre Channel environment in order to get NVMe over Fabrics to work?
- What would an NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) architecture look like?
- What advantages would I get using Fibre Channel in an NVMe solution?

Check out this live webinar to learn more about this exciting new technology from the people who are developing it.

Buffers, Queues, and Caches, oh my! Buffers and Queues are part of every data center architecture, and a critical part of performance – both in improving it as well as hindering it. A well-implemented buffer can mean the difference between a finely run system and a confusing nightmare of troubleshooting. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine.

However, there is something of a mystique surrounding these different data center components, as many people don’t realize just how they’re used and why. In this pod of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, we’re going to be demystifying this very important aspect of data center storage. You’ll learn:

•What are buffers, caches, and queues, and why you should care about the differences?
•What’s the difference between a read cache and a write cache?
•What does “queue depth” mean?
•What’s a buffer, a ring buffer, and host memory buffer, and why does it matter?
•What happens when things go wrong?

These are just some of the topics we’ll be covering, and while it won’t be exhaustive look at buffers, caches and queues, you can be sure that you’ll get insight into this very important, and yet often overlooked, part of storage design.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=615

With the 2017 suite release, HPE’s Data Center Automation (DCA) is recharged for the new year! The DCA suite is HPE’s infrastructure management solution to automate tasks, orchestrate IT processes, enforce compliance, and optimize infrastructure across virtual and physical servers, database and middleware applications. In this webinar, we’ll share what’s new and what’s coming, and equally address top-of-mind questions about the suite.

How big is the global colocation market in 2017? How much revenue is going to be generated by data center colocation providers in 2020? What are the trends driving both global and regional data center demand for colocation providers? Structure Research conducted an extensive and detailed bottom-up study of the global colocation competitive landscape and includes over 4,000 providers across the world. The webinar will help address the current state of the data center landscape and more importantly, where is it headed over the next 3-5 years.

The data center is evolving to encompass all manners of architecture from server-less aka functions-as- a-service to containers and microservices while balancing more mature constructs like virtualization and software-defined constructs. The reality is that the same fundamental issues abound while new challenges will appear.

In this session, we will discuss how to monitor data centers with discipline to handle the old and new pain points that will arise in 2020.

- What will 2020 data centers look like? Who will be the key providers of services?

- How do I keep my career viable in 2020?

- What should I put into practice to deliver success in 2020 data centers?

What does the future datacenter look like? Is it racks and racks of computers? Is it heavily automated? Is it just a shim to the larger world of the cloud? Join this dynamic panel discussion where we will delve into the future of the datacenter with experts from The Virtualization Practice (TVP Strategy).

We will discuss where we are going, how the hybrid cloud fits in and the ultimate vision of the datacenter. It all starts with the journey...

With today’s pressures on lowering our carbon footprint and cost constraints within organizations, IT departments are increasingly in the front line to formulate and enact an IT strategy that greatly improves energy efficiency and the overall performance of data centers.

This channel will cover the strategic issues on ‘going green’ as well as practical tips and techniques for busy IT professionals to manage their data centers. Channel discussion topics will include:
- Data center efficiency, monitoring and infrastructure management;
- Data center design, facilities management and convergence;
- Cooling technologies and thermal management
And much more